“Dusk,” I explain further, “would then flood the Chapel, and destroy it. The Blind Cathar, whose half-sentient vestiges reside withinthe Chapel, would perish. Any Anchorites touched by the Dusk would die. Any Anchorites elsewhere would have lost their psychodecanter, and be as susceptible to the aging process as the rest of humanity.”
Holly asks the less-than-obvious: “You said the Blind Cathar was a genius, a mystic Einstein who could ‘think’ matter into being. Why didn’t he notice his masterpiece has a chink in its armor?”
“The Chapel was built by faith,” replies Esther. “But faith requires doubt, like matter requires antimatter. That crack, that’s the Blind Cathar’s doubt. It dates from before he became what he later became. Doubt that he was doing God’s work. Doubt that he had the right to take the souls of others so that he could cheat death.”
“So you plan to … stick dynamite into the crack?”
“Nitroglycerin won’t scratch the paintwork,” says Фshima. “The place has withstood the Dusk for centuries. A nuclear explosion might do the job, but warheads aren’t very portable. What’s needed is psychosoteric dynamite.”
Esther clears Unalaq’s throat. “That would be me.”
Holly checks with me: “A suicide mission?”
“If our defector is fake, and his promise to show us how to safely demolish the Chapel is a lie and a trap, then that contingency is real.”
“Marinus means yes,” says Фshima. “A suicide mission.”
“Christ,” says Holly. “So are you going up alone, Esther?”
Esther shakes Unalaq’s head. “If D’Arnoq is luring the last Horologists up the Way of Stones, he’ll want allof the last Horologists, not just one. If the Second Mission isan ambush, I’ll need the others to buy me time. Detonating your soul isn’t a beginner’s party trick.”
I hear the piano, faintly. Inez is playing “My Wild Irish Rose.”
Holly asks, “So ifEsther has to blow up this—enemy HQ, say, and assuming she succeeds …” She looks at the rest of us.
“Dusk dissolves living tissue,” says Фshima. “The End.”
“Unless,” I venture, “there was a way back to the Light of Day that we don’t yet know about. One built by an ally. On the inside.”
Half a mile above us, a cloud passes between our skylight and our nearest star and the oblong of sunshine fades away.
Holly reads me. “What is it you still haven’t told me?”
I look at Esther, who shrugs Unalaq’s shoulders: You’ve known her the longest. So I say what I won’t be able to unsay later: “On the First Mission, neither I nor Esther actually saw Xi Lo die.”
At certain rare moments, a library is a kind of mind. Holly shifts in her seat. “What did you see?”
“Not a lot in my case,” I say. “I was pouring all my psychovoltage into our shield. But Esther was next to Jacko when Xi Lo’s soul egressed and …” I look at my colleague.
“And ingressed the chakra-eye on the icon of the Blind Cathar. He wasn’t being dragged like a victim. Xi Lo transversed in, like a bullet. And … the instant before he vanished, I heard Xi Lo subtell me three words: I’ll be here.”
“We don’t know,” I admit, “if this was a spur-of-the-moment act, or a plan that Xi Lo hadn’t shared, for reasons of his own. If Xi Lo hoped to sabotage the Chapel, he failed. One hundred and sixty-four people have lost their lives and souls in the Chapel of the Dusk since 1984. One poor man was abducted from a secure psychiatric ward in Vancouver only last week. But … Esther thinks that Xi Lo has been preparing the way for the Second Mission. Holly? Are you okay?”
Holly dabs the sleeves of Inez’s shirt against her eyes. “Sorry, I … That ‘I’ll be here,’ ” she says. “I heard it too. In my daymare, in the underpass, outside Rochester.”
Esther is fascinated. “Your voices, your certainties, are silent for you now, but do you remember when it used to insist on something? Maybe the sense was obscure, but the Script refused to change. Do you remember how that felt?”
Holly swallows and composes herself. “I do.”
“The Script insists that Xi Lo is, somehow, alive. To this day.”
“I don’t know,” I say, “if you view Xi Lo as a body snatcher or”—a fierceness is growing in Holly’s whole demeanor—“as a bookshelf, say, of many books, the newest of which is called Jacko Sykes. None of us is saying, ‘If you join the Second Mission, you’ll get your brother back,’ because we’re so much in the dark ourselves, but—”
“Your Xi Lo,” Holly interrupts, “is my Jacko. You loved your founder, your friend, as I loved— love—my brother. Dunno, maybe that makes me an idiot. I mean, you’re a club of immortal professors who’ve probably readthese books”—she indicates the four walls of bookshelves, rising to the skylight—“while I left school without one A-level, even. Or maybe I’m even sadder than that, maybe I’m just clutching at straws, magic straws, hoping, hoping, pathetically, like a mother paying her life savings to a psychic shyster to ‘channel’ her dead son … But y’know what? Jacko’s still my brother, even if he isbetter known as Xi Lo and older than Jesus, and if the shoe was on the other foot, he’d come and find me. So, Marinus, if there’s one chance in a thousand that Xi Lo or Jacko is in this Chapel of the Dusk or Dunes or wherever and this Second Mission of yours’ll get me to him, I’m in. You’re not stopping me. Just you bloody try.”
The oblong of light is back and motes of dust swirl in the sunshine slanting down the wall of books. Golden pollen.
“Our War must strike you as otherworldly, but dying in the Chapel is just as final as dying in a car crash here. Consider Aoife—”
“Earlier, you said you can’t guarantee Aoife’s safety, or mine, unless these Anchorites are taken down. That isright, yeah?”
My conscience wants a recess, but I must agree. “Yes, I stand by that statement. But our enemy is dangerous.”
“Look, I’m a cancer survivor, I’m in my fifties, and I’ve never shot an air pistol even, and I’ve got no”—her hand dances—“psychopowers. Not like you, anyway. But I’m Aoife’s mother and Jacko’s sister and these—these individuals have harmed, or threatened, people Ilove. So here’s the thing: I’mdangerous.”
For what it’s worth,subremarks Фshima, I believe her.
“Sleep on it,” I tell Holly. “Decide in the morning.”
April 7
INEZ DRIVES. She’s wearing dark glasses to hide the effects of a sleepless abysmal night. The wipers squelch every few seconds. We don’t say much and there’s not a lot to say. Unalaq sits up front, and Фshima, Holly, Arkady, and I are squashed into the back. Фshima’s hosting Esther today. New York is damp, in a hurry, and indifferent to the fact that we Horologists plus Holly are risking our metalives and life for total strangers, their psychovoltaic children, and for the unborn whose parents have not yet met. I notice details I ordinarily overlook. Faces, textures, materials, signs, flows. There are days when New York strikes me as a conjuring trick. All great cities do and must revert to jungle, tundra, or tidal flats, if you wait long enough, and I should know. I’ve seen it with my eyes. Today, however, New York’s here-ness is incontestable, as if time is subject to it, not it subject to time. What immortal hand or eye could frame these charted miles, welded girders, inhabited sidewalks, and more bricks than there are stars? Who could ever have predicted these vertical upthrusts and squally canyons in Klara Koskov’s lifetime, when I first traveled here with Xi Lo and Holokai—my friends the Davydovs? Yet all this was already there, packed into that magpie entrepфt like an oak tree packed into an acorn or the Chrysler Building folded up small enough to fit inside the brain of William Van Alen. If consciousness exists beyond the Last Sea and I go there today, I’ll miss New York as much as anywhere.